With an effort, Ethan struggled to his feet. Lopez slipped the heavy uniform jacket from his shoulders and turned it in her hands. The thick fabric was torn where Ethan had landed on his back, but it had protected him from injury. She showed it to him.
‘You realize that luck does run out, eventually,’ she said.
Ethan nodded, looking up as a squad car pulled up nearby with lights ablaze and sirens wailing. Ethan limped toward them with the rifle in his hands, relieved to see Zamora climbing out of the car.
‘They went south in a silver Crown Vic,’ Ethan called out, and gave Zamora the registration number before handing him the rifle.
‘This the murder weapon?’ Zamora asked.
‘Yeah.’
Zamora turned and tossed the rifle into the back of the squad car.
‘Hey, that’s evidence,’ Ethan protested, pointing at the rifle and then wincing as pain bolted up his arm.
‘Yes it is,’ Zamora agreed. ‘It has fingerprints on it and we’ll have them analyzed, but as evidence for homicide it’s useless. You’re thinking about ballistics, aren’t you?’
‘The barrel’s rifled,’ Ethan said. ‘It may have a distinctive effect on the ball, if you’ve recovered it from Carson’s body.’
‘USAMRIID has Carson’s body,’ Zamora said. ‘They’re on the scene already, arrived within a few minutes of the shooting. What you’re forgetting is that these weapons all have rifling, and that means it’s not enough to prove that this weapon fired the ball that killed Carson. More than that, the ball isn’t fired like a modern weapon — it doesn’t have an imprint like a modern bullet so it can’t be connected to any one rifle.’
‘I know,’ Ethan said. ‘But having the weapon is better than not having it. The fingerprints are evidence enough.’
Zamora sighed, rubbing his temples with one hand before gesturing them to join him in his squad car. Ethan sat in aching silence and watched as Zamora recovered the palomino and had it transported back to Sedillo Park before he drove back in silence. They arrived to see ranks of re-enactors filing en masse from the field which, in its center, now had a police cordon.
Butch Cutler was there already, directing his staff with bellowed commands. He turned as Ethan limped across to the cordon, Zamora and Lopez either side of him. Cutler looked at Ethan’s bedraggled, bruised and bloodied form, and smiled.
‘You look like shit, Warner, but I’m pleased to say it’s the last time I’ll have to see you at all because if I do, I’ll arrest you on sight.’
‘We’re leaving,’ Ethan said without emotion. ‘We captured the murder weapon, it’s in Officer Zamora’s patrol car.’
Cutler raised an eyebrow in surprise.
‘What of the perpetrators?’
‘Escaped,’ Zamora replied. ‘We’ve got their license plate out, one of the patrols will find them soon enough.’
‘Not if they go into the deserts,’ Ethan said.
‘Either way,’ Cutler growled, ‘it’s none of your business now, Warner. Once again you’ve brought chaos to New Mexico and now you’ve outstayed your welcome. Get off this field, get cleaned up and then get the hell out of here or I’ll have you in a cell by sundown.’
Ethan said nothing as he turned his back and walked away, trying not to limp.
‘How the hell did they get here so damned fast?’ he asked out loud.
Lopez walked alongside him. ‘They’re up to something. Question is, what are we going to do about it?’
‘We’ll do what Cutler wants, and stay out of Santa Fe,’ Ethan replied. ‘Tell Zamora to let us know when his men find that car. We’ll go pick up some equipment, and start taking the fight to the enemy.’
41
‘What news, Donald?’
Jeb Oppenheimer sat behind his desk, the windows around his office opaque once again and his monitor showing an image of Donald Wolfe at the USAMRIID headquarters at Fort Detrick, Maryland.
‘We’ve got a USAMRIID team working in Santa Fe and Socorro counties, trying to keep up with everything that’s going on down there. So far we haven’t recovered any useful material from the apartments or from any of the crime scenes.’
Oppenheimer leaned forward on the table keenly.
‘What about the body, the one found at Sedillo Park?’
Wolfe smiled.
‘Perfectly preserved — we had the corpse on ice within an hour of death. So far the level of decay is minimal. However, the acceleration is irreversible once death has occurred. Sooner or later the remains will also be useless to us.’
Oppenheimer leaned back in his chair and sighed with relief, still unable to believe that he had finally obtained what he had searched for for so many decades.
‘How could they have known about this man before us?’ he demanded. ‘Lee Carson? I’ve been searching for these people, chasing legends and stories for thirty years or more, then Ethan Warner and Nicola Lopez stroll down here and identify one of them within two days.’
Wolfe shook his head, his hands raised in a gesture of helplessness.
‘I don’t know, but it must have had something to do with Tyler Willis. We know that Hiram Conley was talking to him. He could have identified the survivors to Willis, who then told Warner and Lopez.’
Oppenheimer shook his head slowly.
‘No, Willis was too afraid of what I would do to him to have held anything back. They must be coming out of hiding for some reason. Willis didn’t know where Conley and Carson had gained their longevity, but he did say it must have been bacterial.’
‘If you hadn’t damned well killed Willis we could have asked,’ Wolfe murmured.
‘It was an accident,’ Oppenheimer replied. ‘I had no intention of killing him. Tyler Willis was one of the finest researchers into the field of senescence, far too valuable to simply eradicate.’
‘So what do we do now?’ Wolfe asked.
‘I need to have a chat with Warner and Lopez, how shall I say, more discreetly this time.’
‘That could be a problem. According to reports, Warner and Lopez have gone off the radar.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘They’ve left Santa Fe and Socorro county. My men on the ground don’t know where they are right now.’
Oppenheimer struggled to comprehend what Wolfe was saying.
‘Then goddamned find them again!’
‘It’s not that easy,’ Wolfe countered. ‘New Mexico is huge. If they’ve gone out into the wilderness it could take an entire army to locate them. Warner is a former Marine. If he wanted to, he could hide out there for years and we wouldn’t find him.’
Oppenheimer closed his eyes, sitting back in his chair and forcing himself to think clearly. It had for years been a major problem in his quest that the individuals he sought were almost certainly spending large amounts of time living out in the Pecos wilderness, or under pseudonyms in small towns scattered all over the state. Tracking them down was almost impossible as they moved regularly to avoid detection, and they seemed to always have some kind of support from within the towns — people who supplied them with medicines or money or clothes. Oppenheimer had never identified these mysterious benefactors any more than he had the extremely aged men he sought.
‘We’ll have to go after them,’ he said finally. ‘If they make contact then this whole thing will be for nothing.’
‘Perhaps not,’ Wolfe said, ‘depending on how we play it.’
‘How so?’
Wolfe’s expression hardened as he spoke.
‘It would appear that whatever afflicts these men, it isn’t permanent.’
Oppenheimer’s heart seemed to skip a beat in his chest.
‘What do you mean?’